It was announced a couple of days ago that Apple's market capitalization put it ahead of Microsoft, making it America's largest tech company.

I've been an Apple fan since our Elementary school got Apple II clones in the classroom when I was in the 4th grade. During Junior High, I wasn't exposed to computers very often, save for the IBM PCs at my dad's office, or at my friends' houses. I just didn't get those machines. They made no sense to me.

Then in the 10th grade, I changed schools and joined the journalism class at Bradshaw High School, a move that changed my life (seriously, that's not hyperbole). I had only seen a Mac once before, on a teacher's desk in Junior High, but the journalism classes at Bradshaw had 3, a Mac SE, an SE/30, and a IIsi. I was hooked. It was because of that class, and those Macs, that I became interested in graphic design.

By the next year, I was the laying out the ads section of the Yearbook, doing my best to recreate the advertisers' logos and their corporate identities, instead of just using Times New Roman to do a bunch of text only ads, as had been done before.

It hasn't always been easy being an Apple guy, but I've always been a staunch advocate for their way of doing things. It occurred to me yesterday that I haven't had to refute the claim that Microsoft owns Apple in a long time. I used to have to hear that from some of my wife's family members. To be sure, Microsoft was basically forced to invest $150 million into Apple in 1997 to keep the U.S. government off their backs because they were becoming a monopoly. They had to help ensure there was some semblance of a competitor out there. (The money was also basically a settlement payment to end the patent infringement lawsuits Apple had been fighting with Microsoft ever since they launched Windows, a copy of the Lisa and Mac).

Once Steve Jobs is gone, Apple's star may not shine as bright, but he has created a culture there that, I believe will continue the momentum that began when he returned to the company.

First off, this thing is a little heavier than it should be. I wouldn't mind having just one battery, with the ability to add on our snap in the additional battery. I think the limitation of only having a five-hour battery would be worth it given the decrease in weight. That said, the battery life on this thing is really 10 hours+, they weren't lying on that. You can use it all day, and not need to recharge it.

It's a little awkward to hold it. It seems to be great when you're using it on a desktop. Or if you're laying down it seems to work fine. But, when you're just sitting within your lap, it's a bit awkward. One-handed operation is possible with the iPhone, but not necessarily so with the iPad. It's no wonder that the demos that Apple created showed the users with it on their lap rather than holding it in the air. Holding it up by while your using it in your lap gets tiring. Of course, Well by the extra screen real estate really quickly. when the iPhone came out, I said that you can use it one-handed, which turned out to not be the case.

You get spoiled by the extra screen real estate very quickly. What's really interesting is having used this and then going back and using the iPhone. The iPhone feels really small now.

Some of the quirks that I'd like to see addressed:

• Muscle memory in my fingers has been trying to hit the delete key in the wrong spot all the time. It's a little disjointing moving back and forth from an iPhone app to an iPad app on the iPhone, mostly because of the placement of the keys. I keep reaching for the delete key in the wrong places.
• Also the apostrophe key needs to be more prominent on the iPad keyboard.
• WiFi reception is sketchy at times. I get five bars and I get one bar for no good reason. (Seems like a firmware issue)
• Why are you making me buy a calculator? One should be included.

The good news is that all of this can be addressed via a software update.

Magazines and Newspapers
I'm not sure what time of the magazine companies are thinking with their pricing on their iPad versions. Five dollars for Time magazine that you can pay less than three dollars for the news stand? I don't think they get it. There are some nice interfaces for them though, especially Popular Science. (Here's a good video showing off the art direction.)

The Wall Street Journal has a nice interface too, but it's really slow because it fetches and preloads ALL the articles and images when you launch it. Not sure I'll pay a subscription, it's not like I was reading it already, but it's a nice experience if you're into that paper.

iBooks
Apple's iBooks app is a good start, but I won't be buying any books for it until there is an iPhone client, and support for notes and highlighting. I had already been using the Kindle app on my iPhone to read a couple of books, and now I can sync my bookmarked location between my iPhone and my iPad, allowing me to whip out my iPhone to read a book while waiting at Anna's swim lessons, etc. I'm sticking with the Kindle app for now.

So Many Things Are Right On
There are a lot of things that the iPad gets completely right. E-mail and web browsing is fantastic on it. With the new iPhone software update coming over the next few days (hopefully) e-mail will be even better because of the unified keyboard. Photo scrolling and Safari zooming in and out really is as responsive as in the videos. And it really is like holding the web in your hands.

As soon as I can find the perfect note-taking app, I'll be even happier with it.

Favorite apps so far:
Twitepad
Good Reader
Plants vs Zombies
Kindle

I had a hard time shooting it, mostly because I was laughing so hard. And when Cops: Sumatanga was finished, we thought that it was hilarious. The camp staff thought it was hilarious. The reaction from the campers wasn't quite as strong. I guess a video with a counselor being mean to campers didn't translate as well as one where a rubber bird terrorizes campers.

Back to the drawing board for next year. I now present for your viewing pleasure, my magnum opus: Cops - Sumatanga.

The Crimson Tide went 6-7 last season and has not won a national championship in 15 years. Yet a number of Alabama fans truly expect Saban to have a 10-victory team this season and be in the BCS title game within three years. And those are the rational fans.

Dear Cary:

Who is a delusional Alabama fan? I am.

I guess it's just that I couldn't really related to it. I had never unexpectedly lost someone that I was more than just an acquaintance with. I guess I really should consider myself very fortunate. Death has not been anything that I've had to deal with in a long time. Two of my grandparents died when I was in high school and that affected me, but not in this way. I had another grandparent that I wasn't close to die in college. Didn't really affect me. But hearing yesterday that my friend Matt Miller had died hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew Matt through working with him at Camp Sumatanga. There's just something about the friendships that are forged in those circumstances. The intensity of a weeklong camp has the effect of hanging out with someone for a month. Sharing a religious experience like that create a bond of friendship that is stronger than most any other I've experienced.

Matt was in Memphis during the week attending Memphis Theological Seminary, so he and I would have lunch from time to time, talking about our mutual love for the Crimson Tide and Sumatanga and more. On Wednesday, he was over at our house, telling us stories of his crazy experiences as a church pastor who moonlights as the Assistant Chief of Police in rural Alabama over a bottle of wine and some steaks. Three days later, he was gone, having drowned in a duck hunting accident in Arkansas.

As I read through the comments posted on his Wall on Facebook last night and through the status updates of our mutual friends, it made me wonder if he knew how loved and respected he was. Maybe we should all take the time to let the people in our lives know how we really feel about them while we still have a chance.

Nooma - Matthew - Rob Bell

Suffering the loss of a loved one can be the most difficult thing we face. Sometimes all the reasoning and comforting words in the world just aren’t what we need. What might help us, however, is to understand how Jesus dealt with this kind of loss.

Nooma - Matthew 1 of 2:

Nooma - Matthew 2 of 2:

• Cracker - Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey

Cracker was one my favorite bands in college. In the 90's they released some of the best albums of the decade. Catchy songs with quirky subjects. In the 00's, they seemed to have lost their direction...until this album.

• The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love
Proof that the album isn't dead. This one was meant to be listened to in one sitting. I included a song in my mix below, but to get the full effect, you should listen to the album.

The Best Songs of 2009

Download zip of all songs | Preview Songs in iTunes

1.	Phoenix Lisztomania
2.	Matt & Kim Daylight
3.	Idlewild Younger Than America
4.	The Decemberists The Rake's Song
5.	Wilco You and I
6.	the dodos Small Deaths
7.	Manchester Orchestra I've Got Friends
8.	Sonic Youth Anti-Orgasm
9.	Yeah Yeah Yeahs Dull Life
10.	Ra Ra Riot Ghost Under Rocks
11.	Tegan & Sara Hell
12.	Neko Case People Got A Lotta Nerve
13.	A.C. Newman Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer
14.	Cracker Turn On Tune In Drop Out With Me
15.	Roman Candle Why Modern Radio Is A-Ok
16.	Metric Satellite Mind
17.	Animal Collective Brothersport
18.	Thao with the Get Down Stay Down Know Better Learn Faster
19.	Passion Pit To Kingdom Come

See Also:

The Best Music of 2007
The Best Music of 2008

So now instead, we're going to end up with these nude scanners in every airport and Lieberman says we should be considering a pre-emptive strike on Yemen. Someone is going to make a lot of money off of this.

Instead we should be taking a long look at WHY this is happening, and making the changes that we need to make to stop this. People aren't doing these things because they hate us. Terrorism doesn't develop in a vacuum.

I had been meaning to share some of the Joomla knowledge I have gained over the last few years on my blog for a long time. Some of the best knowledge out there comes from researching a topic via Google. There's not a whole lot out there about using Joomla to build a school website. I hope this helps get someone started.

If you decided you wanted to change the size and color of all of the H1 (heading 1, the largest headline size) elements, you had to make that same change on hundreds of pages. If you decided that you wanted to add an element to the navigational menu, you had to also change every file on the site.

Part of the reason for this structure is that it’s the easiest and simplest in terms of required knowledge to implement. It’s also the most inefficient way to do it. Ideally, content is divorced from style and layout. The layout is defined in the website’s one and only page. The style is defined in a cascading style sheet (CSS), and the content is populated from a database based on what the end user is requesting to see.

Static sites are easier to develop (up to a point…size does become an issue pretty quickly), but harder to maintain. A dynamic site is harder to develop, but easier to maintain.

The first school websites were pretty simple, but as the website has moved from a supplemental item in the school's overall communications strategy to the primary medium of communications between school and parent, a powerful site that is easy enough for teachers and administrators to contribute to is a necessity.

The question is whether or not you should develop this in-house, or outsource it.

There are a lot of advantages in using software that was designed with schools in mind. There's far less time spent on reinventing the wheel. With an outsourced site, the hosting, server, and security issues would be the problem of our vendor. And features like email push pages (really just a fancy way of saying ‘newsletter’), calendars, and parent directories are are better integrated into the overall site.

The problem with outsourcing is the cost involved. I found that it would cost us over $100,000.

We chose to continue to develop our own site. Not every school has the option of going it on their own, but if you have someone with the right expertise on staff, it’s absolutely achievable.

Joomla

In 2006, after investigating several other options, I settled on the Joomla content management system (CMS) as the basis for our school’s site. Joomla is the tool that we use to manage all of the content on our site. It’s the engine on which the body of the site is built.

I don’t know of too many elementary schools using Joomla, but several universities are using it, including the University of Nebraska, and Oklahoma State University.

Our current site is actually our second Joomla site. From 2006-2009, we used Joomla 1.0 for our site. Joomla 1.5 was a significant enough change in the codebase of Joomla that I elected to take the lessons I learned from building that site and make our current site that much better.

One of the advantages of Joomla is the healthy add-on community. These add-ons extend Joomla, allowing it to go beyond just hosting articles. There are add-ons to implement calendars, accept reservations and donations, and for web stores.

I know of some other schools that using a competing open-source CMS called Drupal.

The Design of the Site

PDS Website

In 2009, when it was time for a redesign and re-architecture of the entire structure of the site, I decided to not start from the zero since a great deal of time can go into creating a good site layout. In 2006, I created the site’s layout from scratch, which can take weeks to tweak. I'm a one-man show. Implementing all of the new features I had in mind was more than enough work to keep me busy in the Spring and Summer, so I started with a template and customized it to fit my needs.

Even though I could have coded my own, it was far more cost effective to use one of the many commercial Joomla template providers as a starting point. Many of them offer menu systems, and special features that add a great deal of polish to the user experience along with the style of the site. As I mentioned in the requirements section, knowing how to customize the template to make it look like your own is essential. Just think of how many Blogspot blogs you come across that all look essentially the same.

In the independent school business, you are offering a product that your customers can get for free from a public school. Your brand helps reinforce the prestige and perceived value of your organization in the public eye.

The resurgence of Apple has proven that the design of a product matters. More than ever, we make decisions about products and companies based on the information we can find about them online. Schools are no different. The design of your site can communicate volumes about your organization.

As a parent, one of the things that frustrates me about my daughter’s school is a lack of organization of news on their site. I only have a limited amount of time as a working parent to spend reading news.

One of the guiding principles behind the design of the PDS site is to have the majority of information that parents need in one place. Not only that, but organize the information in such a way that parents of JK students don’t see news that only applies to parents of SK students. Don’t waste your customer’s time. If all of the content is relevant, you’ll condition them to not ignore parts of the page.

Required Knowledge

Here are the skills that are required to pull this off at your school:

HTML: When I started getting into web design back in the mid 1990’s, my dad told me that it would never go anywhere. He demonstrated software that would build your website for you. Microsoft Front Page, was the program. It’s 15 years later, and there is STILL no tool that will create a professional site where you don’t have to get your hands dirty by going into the code. Understanding HTML at an intermediate to advanced level is a pre-requisite.

CSS: An intermediate to advanced understanding of CSS is also a must. CSS is the best way to layout and style website content.

PHP: PHP is a scripting language used to run a great number of the sites you visit every day. You don’t need to know how to program in it, but a basic understanding will help when you find an add-on extension that almost does everything you need. With a little bit of tweaking in PHP, you can get it to do exactly what you need. Plus, many of the other open source content management systems are built on PHP.

MySQL: MySQL is a free database system. You don’t need to know that much about it…until something goes wrong. Understanding how to back it up and restore it, and how to repair a corrupted user session table are handy. Plus just a basic understanding of the structure will speed the process of importing information into your site.

Design: While there are professional, highly polished templates sites available for sale, most aren't well-suited to school sites. When you do find one that is close, making it look like your school’s brand requires design skills and expertise in Photoshop and Illustrator (or Fireworks). It’s also important to understand how typography communicates the importance and hierarchy of information.

Server Administration: This is one of those areas where I am a novice at best. You can always go with a hosting service, but I’ve had issues with that in the past. An on-site server gives you easy access for backup, and speedy uploads. 100% of your content providers are in the building. Having a quick in-house connection to the site is a major benefit. This is one of the areas where I lean on a college friend. I’m getting better at it, but I don’t pretend to be anything but a novice.

The Tools

If, after all that, you still want to go it on your own using Joomla, here are some of the add-ons that I found useful.

JoomlaPack

This free backup utility will backup your entire site in one step. You can then download the backup and easily move the entire site to another server in only a couple of steps. With the previous version of our site, I didn't have a way to test out major changes on the site. JoomlaPack allows me to create a backup of the current site and have it up and running somewhere else on my own personal hosting space, or on our backup machine in a matter of minutes.

Display News by BK

The built-in Joomla blog functionality allows you to display content from a section or category. Display News allows you to display it from multiple sections and categories. And you have fine control as to how it is formatted. You can have it output just headlines, or headlines and just the introduction, or output entire articles. It is indispensable.

Acajoom Pro

The newsletter engine for the site. Allows our users to manage/subscribe to news from their son's classes via email.

DT Register

I use this to allow registrations and RSVPs for events. It also has support for PayPal, for payment options.

Online Parent Directory

This is a feature I had been wanting to offer for a long time. It was one of the features I thought we'd only be able to offer if we went with one of the school site companies. Late in the summer, I figured out how to pull this off using an add-on called SOBI 2, but next summer, I will be reworking this using one of the social networking add-ons for Joomla. Community Builder is free, and JomSocial is commercial.

NinjaContent

Provides an interface in the front-end of the site for creating and managing articles. Joomla has a front-end interface and a back-end administrator interface. Our faculty and administration doesn't need to see the back-end. NinjaContent allows for them to create their homework and news items in the front-end of the site. It also allows me to limit some of the areas where they can publish items.

ExTplorer

A file system browser. You can upload, rename, move files, change file permissions, and more.

QuickFAQ

I use this to run our Question and Answer system. Our goal this year was to have a repository for the questions that get asked over and over again.

Costs

Other than the man hours required, which are significant, this is a far more cost effective way to build a site for your school. Don’t forget to build in the amount of hours you will need to spend on maintenance. You need to especially be vigilant about security. One of the benefits of using a popular CMS is the multitude of add-on options. One of the drawbacks is that with popularity comes hackers. I spend the first part of each work day reviewing the latest patches for all of the my add-ons, which are usually the weak spot in the security of a Joomla site.

Hosting/Hardware

You need to determine how you are going to host the site. Don’t make the mistake I made, thinking that a shared business account is going to work. These companies claim that your only limitation is the amount of bandwidth per month and the amount of space you use. Don’t buy it. We used 1&1, one of the larger hosting providers, and they shut the site down because of us using “too many resources on the system.” Worse of all, they didn’t notify us about it, they just crippled the site. It took me hours on the phone to figure out why our site suddenly began crawling. Your hosting costs won't be of the $10 a month variety.

We host our site in-house on an Apple XServe. We also have a Mac Pro that serves as a backup site. You could probably get away with a Mac mini as a backup. You just need something in case of an emergency.

Cost: $3500 for server + $1000 for backup + Hosting costs (ours is hosted internally, at no additional cost)

Software

While the core Joomla CMS is free, some of the add-ons and templates are not. Most are fairly inexpensive. I would estimate that we spent around $1000 on software for the site.

Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't go this route. A company that specializes in website for schools will have insight into best practices for school sites. Security, backup, and maintenance issues are taken care of.

There absolutely is a learning curve involved in setting up a site like this as well, but it is a far less expensive way to go for an organization looking to keep costs under control.

One of the things that the doctor interview rightly pointed out is that the area is full of a lot of poorer people who simply can't afford the foods they would need to change their lifestyle.

Jamie and I really changed our lifestyle a couple of years ago. After yo-yoing back up a few years ago, I decided to try something different. Atkins wasn't sustainable, I tried it. You can do it for a while, but the variety of foods just isn't there. You can only take that much meat and green vegetables for so long.

And exercise alone is not enough. Unless you change what you eat, it's not going to work.

So we did the South Beach Diet, and that's pretty much what we still eat now, a couple of years later. And it is expensive. Sure, we could get rid of some of the more expensive South Beach brand convenience/comfort food items, but that's what has worked for us. My main snack is a mix of nuts. Those things are crazy expensive.

Mint says that we spend more than twice as much on groceries as others in our state. Though we spend about a third of what most folks in the state spend on restaurants.

The general rule of thumb really is that the vast majority of the foods you eat should be found on the perimeter of the grocery store, and not in the interior aisles. But despite what the Federal government says, things ARE getting more expensive.

It's just going to be really hard for Americans to lose the weight with the costs so high.

Writing
I need to write a couple of pieces for work tomorrow, so consider this a warm-up. I minored in English in college, but I really don't like to write. In fact, nothing slows me down more than a blank page. I am most productive at work when I have 100% of the content of something provided, and I can chisel away and create something out of it.

I always say that it's hard to know what the finished puzzle looks like, when I don't have all the pieces in place. I'm kind of in that situation right now with one of our major yearly publications.

Kitchen
We're almost there on our kitchen. We started six weeks ago on Monday. Looks like we'll finally be finished next week. Whew... 7 weeks. Thankfully, Jamie's parents have been great about letting us eat over there, so we haven't had to get take-out nearly as often as I thought we would. The finish line is in sight. I'll post a gallery of before and after construction photos next week. It's all driving Jamie nuts though. She hates clutter around the house (she's majorly type-A), and our dining room still has the contents of our old kitchen piled up all over the place. Thanks to Dave Ramsey, we did it all in cash too. Still debt-free (except the house, of course.)

Movies
I came down with the Swine Flu or some other virus this week, and I ended up catching up on some movies I've had ripped and sitting in Boxee on my Mac mini for a while, along with some more recent ones. Jamie and I used to hit the movies every weekend. Now I see about 3 a year, and 2 of them are usually kids' movies. Funny how that goes. I don't even watch as much through Netflix.

My theory on movies is that part of the reason I don't watch as much movies is that we've gotten spoiled by how much better TV shows are. Go back and watch some of the older TV shows, they're ridiculously bad. The writing is usually bad, the acting is atrocious. The plots are simple. Now you take a show like Lost: TV shows are as complex as movies.

I ended up watching some of the summer stuff that I missed. Transformers 2: I want my 2 hours back. I guess the only reason I didn't turn it off was my affinity for the characters from my childhood. Wolverine: Better than I thought it would be, based on the reviews I had read on it. Battlestar Galactica: The Plan: I really liked it. I think this should have been the last few episodes before the finale. I also watched AMC's remake of The Prisoner: Started out well, but ended up a mixed bag.

I'm also pretty behind on games. Wish I had more time to play. Call of Duty: Modern Combat 2 is out, I know, but I have yet to play World at War. Just finishing up Gears of War 2. Great game, btw. I did luck out and get Halo ODST a couple of days after release via GameFly. Good stuff.

More to come...